Pierre Gosselin reports that environmental experts, professors, and some green leaders in Germany are fed up at the deforestation, the fraud and the futility. They are protesting at the waste of money in the name of ecology as trees and birds get destroyed, electricity prices skyrocket, but nothing gets achieved for the climate. One has put together a book titled: “Sacrificed Landscapes – How the Energiewende Is Destroying our Landscapes.”

They might mistakenly think there is a man-made crisis in the climate but they are honest players, and they realize that real environmental causes are being used as a guise for a planned economy and self serving corruption:

Now that Germany’s Energiewende has been in full swing for a number of years, many leading environmentalists are in a state of shock as huge areas of the country are being deforested and landscapes disfigured to make way for hundreds of wind turbines.

Environmentalist Georg Etscheit is a regular contributor at Germany’s leading climate alarmism site, Klimaretter, and he as well, has had enough. Etscheit will be releasing a book in early November.

Wind farms dominate the landscape in Germany. From the promotional video.

The book contains many quotes:

Jörg Rehmann, journalist and author:

If we want to survive on this planet, we need an Energiewende. But what the policymakers have made of it is not an Energiewende, rather it is the greatest fraud project since the end of the second world war.”

Prof. Dr. Niko Paech, later adds:

Science is legitimizing a rampage against nature. We destroy the landscape while we claim it is serving the ecology. It’s a cannibalism by the measures. Climate protection is the aim that justifies the means to destroy all other remaining environmental media.”

Pierre Gosselin remarks: My feeling is that the zeitgeist is right, and this book will do very well.

Jo would like to see the real environmentalists on both sides of the climate debate start to seriously talk. It would be a productive conversation. An alliance like that would undermine the phoney greens, and maybe one day environmental legislation might actually help the environment…

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Rating: 9.7/10 (101 votes cast)

German environmentalists say renewables are destroying their landscapes, killing nature, wasting money, 9.7 out of 10 based on 101 ratings

The key question here is this – Is the environment important?
Or put another – who died and allowed the greenies to become king/control society?

The fact we have greenies on both sides talking, to me, is irrelevent – it implies they are important. They arent.

Science is important, providing a standard of living for your family is important, ecology …yeah well…. best effort on the day.

Thats not to say I advocate decimating huge chunks of the planet for financial gain, but recenlty the Left has hijacked the green thing and used it bludgeon society around the ears until it bleeds cash, then the UN turns up to squeeze the wound to extract more. The greenies are going to be road kill in the Left power play, but so be it.

There seems to be a bit of Helgian Dialectic at play here – the discussion has been manoevered into a “good green” vs “bad green” thing – I’d suggest that greenies are borderline irrelevent in the overall discussion of big issues within society. When you have minority groups controlling society, you risk a lot of problems. Society is also in a pivotal point right now – we have high levels of instability and like when Hitler became chancellor, he could only do it because the vacuum existed. I’m not comparing greens to hitler, rather drawing a broad comparison.

We need to be very vocal and exert as much sensible influence now to try and manage the debate lest it become rippe dopen and creates a free for all in a race down into the beginnings of slow-burn political anarchy…

Actually, you can begin to question a whole bunch of green “accepted wisdom” when you start to critically think about it. Things like:

-biodiversity
-recycling
-stable ecosystems
-trade off between economic growth and the environment
-sustainable population limits

All become areas where the accepted green “wisdom” is completely open to challenge.

In fact:

Biodiversity is not a universally good thing (think polio then expand that thought experiment to other species)
Recycling is not a universally good thing
There has never been such a thing as a stable ecosystem
There is no trade off between growth and environment
There are no limits to sustainable population in the sense green “wisdom” would have us believe.

Think of biodiversity as a redundant system but with plants, animals, insects, etc. instead of switches and fuses and so on – backups with backups. We’ve been fiddling with it since we started farming and herding and building cities, and so far we haven’t managed to wreck the planet.

But there are things we don’t really know enough about, cycles and relationships between the parts we don’t understand. Take insects – we need certain species in order to have crops; wild crops are needed to sustain some of those species beyond what the crops can provide, non-pollinating insects also rely on and are relied upon by those wild crops and may be relied upon by some of the pollinators. But too many of any one kind, or several, and you’ve got disease, starvation (yes, bugs can starve) and so on, a population drop that could be massive and catastrophic to our ability to harvest enough food, and then we have famine and disease. So, unrelated species and species we don’t -think- are important just might well be in the over-all scheme of things. Of course, mosquitoes and fleas are awful pests – fleas I think we can do away with, but mosquito larvae are an important part of the food chain (can we kill off just the disease vectors? )

In general there is way too much fuss about really rare and isolated species – little fish that live in 1 specific creek, and only part of that creek, or a sub-species of rat that took up living on a sandspit after being washed to sea (or stowing away) and only separated by 50 or 60 years from the mainland type.

It used to be that demagogues took the side of one section or another of the human race, against all the others. Environmentalism has taken this to a whole new level – their constituency consists of everything on the planet *except* the human race.

Since in the past you got [snipped], and upper class Socialists, I suppose it’s no surprise that some actual humans argue for their own extinction…

[Gus you can't suggest one of the world's most evil villains looked like a particular race. That is insulting to that race. -Mod]

Hey, I’m a skeptical environmentalist – one that has long suspected the CAGW was BS and that CO2 is -not- to blame. I absolutely hate what the greenie CAGW crew has been up to, all the hysteria, the pillage of monies and lands for “saving” the environment (hah) and really don’t appreciate their hijacking a nom de plume that once meant caring for the environment – and the people who live in it. Now it’s synonymous with the destruction of millions of acres for wind and solar – not just the “farms”, but the destruction caused by the willy-nilly extraction of the metals needed to manufacture them.

The lies, the rapine of lands, the taxes – not to mention the continued exploitation of 3rd world nations (oh, please, send them more money – via OUR accounts, which we’ll dole out at pennies on the dollar when we feel like it, maybe) and the lack of any progress made in the lofty goals of anti-poverty, anti-disease, self-sustaining industry or even just lain old clean water, it’s beyond disgust.

All that money spent on egos and great big showy toys. Could have built roads, railways, airports, water purification and distribution plants; improved farms, housing, medical care; created jobs, education, essentially new lives for the impoverished AND, done all that with a fraction of the environmental destruction be perpetrated by these fakey-fake alarmists and their fraudulent pretension of “caring” for the world.

The policy also includes a grant scheme for low-income earners, with the grants capped at $5000 per household in the first year of the policy.

The Greens estimate that if the policy were enacted, up to 1.2 million homes across Australia would take up the scheme.

Do the math:
1.2 million x $5,000 = $6 billion.
Remember this is Senator Hanson-Young suggesting this.
The same Senator Hanson-Young who has no idea of the difference between super contributions or earnings. On that occasion her chief of staff was sitting outside in the car helpfully texting the good senator the answers and she still didn’t get it.

Batteries eh? No kidding. I’m sure massive battery manufacturing on a global scale will have no impact on the environment either if it could even work. Wind farms are simply unnecessary bird killing, bat killing, noise generating monstrosities. If you truly believe in environmentalism I can’t see why you like wind so much. Too bad they drank the CO2 Kool Aid because you are out of options. Being that the world is at ‘Peak Stupid’ I guess their next option will be no power at all. Get ready for horse drawn firetrucks and a life expectancy of 40 years.

I have been making the same points about the environmental vandalism and degradation caused by this love affair with eco-crucifixes over at the Fairfax collective, but the alarmists over there are so brainwashed and deluded that they see these horrendous scars on our ridges and coastlines as things of beauty. They literally worship them!

No doubt though, that this report will go down the same way as Lovelock’s defection, the koolade drinkers will maintain that, all of a sudden, no one listend to these environmentalists anymore so there opinions don’t count.

I’ve said this before, that if these windmills were pumping oil or gas, the Greens would be calling them a blight on the environment, an eyesore, and be in full war cry mode to stop new ones being built and old ones from remaining standing. I suspect that eco-terrorists would be doing their utmost to bring every one of them down.

Let’s get this book translated into English as soon as possible with a copy sent to some of our hood-winked politicians.

If these hoodwinked politicians couldn’t see it from the start, what’s going to make them see it now? They have eyes and ears, presumably also a brain with which to think, yet they do not see, do not hear and certainly do not think. Maybe I should qualify that a little, they certainly do not think about the right things… …you know, their responsibility to those for whom they work.

Where has the leadership been all these years?

Where has science been all these years? Prostituted to self righteousness if I’m any judge.

Just a quick example: If you remember the fiasco at Waco Texas in which the FBI and the Branch Davidians had both very publicly staked out a position and then were beholden to that position to the extent that neither could budge an inch when the final confrontation came. Consequently many people died. Janet Reno was Attorney General at the time and she could have told the FBI what to do with the situation, right down to the last detail. They could have easily out waited those inside that compound, literally starved them out and would have needed a whole lot less manpower on the scene to do that. But they all had to save face once committed to their position.

Janet Reno had a very personal motive for pleasing her boss, Bill Clinton and it overrode her job responsibility completely. And she has discussed those years publicly.

And so it goes now.

And then there’s the very good likelihood of an ulterior motive… …many of them want to destabilize our governments so they can walk in and make whatever changes they want without going through the prescribed methods for making such changes.

My evidence? Barack Obama during his fight to implement Obamacare:

“I don’t care about the process. I only care about the results.” This was broadcast right from his own mouth across the country on TV.

This is a bold assertion to be sure. But it’s been going on far too long to ignore the evidence.

This book amounts to defection from within the ranks. Will it change the minds that need to be changed? I’m more and more in doubt. More likely those who most need to be influenced by it will think it’s tantamount to treason. The captain of the Titanic went charging across the North Atlantic at full speed in spite of years of experience telling him not to because he “knew” his ship was unsinkable. Is that not what’s been going on for a long time now. Full speed ahead, damn the evidence (and lack thereof) and the complaints, we know we’re right.

People talk a lot about wind turbine blight and high electricity prices but the real “killer” ap for climate change mitigation has to be biofuels. There is growing evidence there is no CO2 benefit what so ever and the increase in tilled acreage in the US for corn ethanol, in Brazil for sugarcane based ethanol and Indonesia for palm oil has done extensive ecological harm.

Nor on a lifecycle basis is there any CO2 savings in Wind or Solar. Neither technology could maintain and replace themselves with the energy they usefully produce over their life. (That is the fraction of their output that is actually consumed to do any work).

The Wind and Solar options are mirages, they don’t save any CO2 to speak of – They just bring the emission forward a few years and move it to China.

Note that under the mirrors there is NO vegetation whereas outside there is scrubby bush, that bush eats around 15 Tonnes of CO2 per Ha per annum – Ivanpah eats NONE. So before Ivanpah saves CO2 it makes some 16-20 T/Ha All that stainless steel and concrete costs CO2 at the beginning of the project in construction. All it succeeds in doing is killing and maiming (blinding) birds that stray into the intense heat of the beam that heats the salt – Man finally creating the devastating heat ray of the war of the worlds and directing it at the birds of the planet. All in the name of (gasp) environmentalism.

bobl, thanks. You are correct, that on a life cycle basis, wind and solar use more energy than they produce, and for the loonies that believe CO2 is a pollutant rather than a life giving gas, they produce more CO2 than they save.
The sad thing is that all of this was known before the plants were built, and any competent engineering firm could have predicted this at a site by site basis.

Abstract
In this paper, I analyze the constraints that limit biomass from becoming an alternative, sustainable and efficient energy source, at least in relation to the current metabolism of developed countries.
In order to be termed sustainable, the use of an energy source should be technically feasible, economically affordable and environmentally and socially viable, considering society as a whole.
Above all, it should meet society’s “metabolic needs,” a fundamental issue that is overlooked in the mainstream biofuels narrative.
The EROI (Energy Return on Investment) of biofuels reaches a few units, while the EROI of fossil fuels is 20–30 or higher and has a power density (W/m2) thousands of times higher than the best biofuels, such as sugarcane in Brazil.
When metabolic approaches are used it becomes clear that biomass cannot represent an energy carrier able to meet the metabolism of industrialized societies. For our industrial society to rely on “sustainable biofuels” for an important fraction of its energy, most of the agricultural and non-agricultural land would need to be used for crops, and at the same time a radical cut to our pattern of energy consumption would need to be implemented, whilst also achieving a significant population reduction.

For those wishing for a bit more information from this paper on the viability of Bio-fuels as an a energy system, the full paper can be read here.

The “Conclusions” at least should be read as they pretty well destroy any green alarmist pretence that bio-fuels will ever be of any benefit to the environment and mankind let alone powering even a minute fraction of mankind’s energy demands today let alone his future energy requirements.

Probably quite applicable to the Greens today and sundry climate alarmists and activists re their bio-fuels activist demands is that burial saying;

Ashes to ashes
Dust to dust

I can now begin to believe that saying will hold for ALL things “Green” in the not so distant future as well in the end in the hard natural, “Nature” based realities of the real world outside of the “Greens” high vacuum intellectual bubble, for everything that is biological.

Nah! Just needed some intellectual rest, Glen,
Plus keeping the chook feeders and sparrow traps numbers I build and sell in the local markets up to the demand which is increasing as the reputation for build and operation quality spreads.

Then caught a coughing Lurgi that got past the flu shots along with my COPD from 30 years of clover harvesting dust starting all of 60 years ago plus diesel fumes and welding fumes has given me a very rough few days and nights ongoing I hope for only another day or so at most if the Doc’s medical know how is any good.

Scroll down here and you will see my chook feeders and a bit of the mesh sparrow traps I also build; 298 sparrows trapped outside my back door in Horsham where I feed a flock of Crimson and Eastern wild rosellas and Creasted Pigeons and etc in 65 days from Dec 24 .2015 to the end of Feb.

Hopefully Georg Etcheit will one day do a bit of reading, look at the real world, and conclude that the CO2 scare is the biggest scientific mistake ever made – and then come right out and say so.
How could anyone ever have thought that covering the landscape with wind turbines would make the slighted scrap of difference to the world’s climate or CO2 levels?
Billions spend globally (name your currency) and not a scrap of difference to anything has it made![Slight editorial discretion applied] Fly

It’s not a scientific mistake, it’s a hoax. It’s bigger than Piltdown Mann and has claimed more scalps, reputations, careers than any other in history except for The Witch Hunts. And, unfortunately, it’s claimed so much money it’s endangering the global economy, not assisting it.

Germany’s stripping of its forests to plant and farm windmills is astonishingly backward. Plant more forests if CO2 is to be controlled. But then CO2 is not a problem. Ask the plants.

Despite the increases in CO2, NZ’s average temperature has remainded steady at about 12.5 dC for over 150 years. Ergo: CO2 as a cause of global warming (northern hemisphere really) is far less than claimed. We have no need to waste our economies for unicorm horn and cheshire cat smiles.

I’d like it to be known that I didn’t use the word ‘mistake’ – it was rather stronger than that, hence Fly’s reference to editorial discretion.
I think it was quite reasonable to tone down my comment as it’s in the public domain!

The issue of practising real environmentalism reminded me of Tony Abbott’s Green Army and the uproar it created with CAGW advocates and MSM outlets, not because it successfully achieved results in the real world where tree planting and soil erosion mitigation is needed but because they couldn’t get their two faced mugs on camera to claim what great climate moralists they are…..oh also because Abbott.

What divine timing that on this day the EU Parliament has voted to ratify (actually illegally) the Paris agreement which the deep greens have already denounced as completely failing in its aspired objectives and a completely futile exercise, the only perception of theirs with which I am in complete agreement. Germany, the driver behind all EU activity is awakening to the fact that the “energiewende” has exposed the second great deceit of the Global Warming Narrative – that “renewables” can replace fossil fuels – in answer to the obvious question of “What do we do for the energy on which the entirety of modern civilisation depends?”. This, one week after the denudement of the brilliant experiment conducted in South Australia, for which future generations will be ever indebted.
Thus Obama’s legacy is crumbling even before Pickfords park their vans by the White House.
Its not as if this hubris is unknown but rather deeply ingrained in our traditions thus -

In each case a foolish elite engaged their subjects in an impossible task to distract them from their individual ambition and exercise control over them. In each case reality sowed dissonance and exposed the deceivers for what the were.

There is still a long way to go as we have still to pay off the hod carriers of Babel but to quote a great mind;

“Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.”
Sir Winston Churchill, Speech in November 1942

About S. A., Jo just got a hat tip from an influential American political blog, Manhattan Contrarian. The writer of the blog, Francis Merton (a former Reagan advisor), has written often about climate change and renewable energy.

“Mr Weatherill accused Malcolm Turnbull of using the emergency to “lecture South Australians about the dangers of renewable energy”.

“We also saw [SA Opposition Leader] Steven Marshall suggest that renewable energy was at the heart of the system,” he said.
…..
“Mr Weatherill also took aim at Independent senator Nick Xenophon for drumming up fear about hospital services by suggesting people would not be able to get their oxygen during the black-out.”

Yep – that would be a legitimate concern…but feel the quality of this fabric….

“The comments came on the same day a preliminary report was released by the Australian Energy Market Operator (AEMO), outlining that it remained unknown what role wind power played in the statewide power outage that lasted up to three days.

“AEMO said in a summary that severe weather, including high winds, thunderstorms, lightning strikes, hail and heavy rainfall, resulted in multiple transmission system faults on Wednesday last week.

“This included the loss of three major 275 kV transmission lines north of Adelaide in the space of 12 seconds.

“It said generation initially flowed through the damaged systems but “following an extensive number of faults in a short period [seconds], 315 MW of wind generation disconnected”.

“The uncontrolled reduction in generation resulted in increased flow on the main Victorian interconnector to make up the deficit,” AEMO said.

“This resulted in the interconnector overloading and an automatic-protection mechanism tripping the interconnector to protect it from damage, causing the rest of SA black-out.

“The report said there was a reduction in wind farm generation at connection points leading up to the outage, but more analysis was required to discern what that cause was.

“While the event was triggered by extreme weather, AEMO will conduct a thorough investigation into how each component of the electricity system responded under these circumstances,” AEMO said.

“Mr Weatherill said the report confirmed early advice that the outage was caused by a weather event, “not a renewable energy event”.

Of course not – it was just the reality the SA grid was unable to actually maintain any form of stability due to the chaotic nature of green powere…..at its heart the politics of green placed all of SA residents at risk by selling out the state to The Big Lie.

Good Morning Jo,
Yes, what a truly great revelation.
Pierre has done lots of truly great work over the last few years, and this is definately another great example.
Let’s just see how the West’s “Green-Spin-Meisters” and the “lame-stream media” try & re-write or blithely ignore this book in November.
Try as they might, I think the weight of evidence in favour of us sceptics is now reaching “critical mass”.
Hopefully in the next one to two years Jo … you, me, unt thousands others of us can start getting laughed with at barbies instead of laughed at, when we say things like “How about all those greenies and self-proclaimed progressives being sucked in by the biggest pyramid scheme, well, evah!!??!!” (L.O.L.)
Keep up the scintillatingly-great work Jo.
Reformed Warmist of Logan

Should I laugh out loud?
HAHAHAHAHAHHHAHAHAHAHAHHAHA!!
You just got to wonder about the human race!! Who would have thought greenies would complain about their own BS!
Of course now that the world REALLY is coming to an end, maybe they will just get rid of themselves? HMMM?!

Glen Michel,
I was using common English parlance, which would sound like Energywend ( according to the Net),whereas, a German speaker would pronounce the ‘g’ as a hard ‘g’, the ‘w’ as a ‘v’,and as you point out, the last ‘e’ as ‘eh’.

True environmentalists support fossil fuels and nuclear. Nuclear, especially has the lowest possible footprint per unit of energy produced. All you need is a reactor site, a uranium or thorium mine and a waste processing and disposal facility. All very compact.

I think the way to go is small nuclear teactors less than 300MW electrical which can be built in a factory, transported to site and new ones added if demand goes up. There is also a saving in cross country transmission lines.

‘Each person in the UK uses an average of 226 Watts throughout the year, and a typical SMR can theoretically produce enough power for roughly 1m people using 226 Watts.

‘Compare this to the largest commercially available wind turbine installed in Denmark which usually runs at 26% of capacity. This equates to supplying 9,203 people – making the difference in output huge.’

There is an added bonus to the small nuclear – it can be installed in 3rd world countries easily. Of course, someone would have to keep an eyeball on the fuel. Or is the fuel amount small enough to not be a huge worry to the paranoid (sometimes rightfully) developed nations?

Molten Salt Reactors should be able to burn any reactor fueld down to ash. That “disposes” of the waste processing and disposal problems of conventional piles. Terrestrial Energy is manufacturing and marketing molten salt unit solutions as (replacable) reactor packages. When an installed MSR is used up/burnt out, truck in a new unit, connect to the power generation heat exchanger, fuel it, run it and remove old carcass …

I think their reactors are uranium fueled rather than Thorium but I could be wrong.

“No… what galled me was that there was this entire room full of reporters and hangers on and interested parties and the folks on the stage and the interviewer AND: Every single one of them seemed just fine with a process that runs through the regulatory jungle of the EPA, has a minimum 1 year of “comment period and review” before even the whiff of a “rule change” could be voted on, and then would be subject to years of litigation, likely up to the Supremes, all to decide what fuel to burn, coal with scrubbing or CCS vs. Natural Gas.

Oh My God!

That, IMHO, ought to be an operational decision made day by day by the plant operator based entirely on the relative cost of coal and natural gas. Not some horrible bureaucratic nightmare with $Millions of litigation costs and a half decade cycle time.”

sciencen f. L scientia knowledge, 1a The state or fact of knowing; knowledge or cognizance of something specified or implied. 1b Theoretical perception of a truth as contrasted with moral conviction (conscience). 2a Knowledge acquired by study; acquaintance with or mastery of a department of learning. 2b Skilful technique (rare)3 A particular branch of knowledge or study; a recognized department of learning; spec. each of the seven medieval liberal arts …

This so called “science” thing, whatever it is, is simply a slight of hand for activists. Nothing but an appeal to authority. A thing which the common man can not appeal against. Partly because they don’t tell you what science report it is they are referring to, and partly because they couldn’t understand it even if they knew which report it was.

You can’t do anything BUT misuse consensus “climate science”, which is not just wrong, not even just wrong-headed, but absolutely incompetent. Incompetent climate scientists started this and incompetent scientists across all of the physical sciences keep it going–else everyone of them would have risen up and trounced it before it became tyrannical political fodder.

Oh, I think they were quite competent – you can’t be that bad, that far off, without knowing what you are doing – like cooking a set of books, you have to start off knowing what is real before you can start “adjusting” the numbers. So while many of the scientists now involved are hangers-on and cheerleaders, the core of those who started the hysteria and laid the base for CAGW just might have known, very well, what they were doing. Of course, I am sure a few were not aware of the lack of morality/scruples – those who have left the camp, certainly. It is one thing to arbitrarily pick a gas or chemical for a model run, to see what happens – it’s another to set the entire house of cards on something you know is untested and with something most likely not at fault.

But, like all schemes, well-designed or not, it’s starting to crumble.

Slowly, slowly, slowly the tide may be turning.
Spain, California, Germany, South Australia.
More and more people are waking up that this is all a greater hoax than Y2k and perpetuated by thousands of professional people who should know better.
And the cost!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

They do know better. The UN, IPCC, EU, NASA and the carbon baggers with their windmills, solar panels, batteries, government subsidies. Climate Change makes as much sense with as much evidence as scientology, faux science based religious for the weak minded and the opportunists. Even words like emitter, pollution, polluters are stolen from real ecology, real environmentalism. CO2 is not pollution. It is the essential gas from which all life on earth is created through photosynthesis.

Also the Germans worship their trees. It is part of their ancient love of forest. Clearing for crops to eat is acceptable. Clearing to build windmills which you don’t need is another. It is also not only the landscapes which are destroyed. In the North Sea there are thousands of giant windmills around the coast. Whatever you think of the vista, it is changed and you have to question whether it is right. All these giant structures will in time have to be removed. They are unsustainable.

and recycling the recyclable parts. Dunno what they’ll do with the towers. Sell them to the Dutch to build bigger better dykes with them? Or donate them to Bangla Desh to build flood control embankments?

That would be the (fibreglass) nacelle and the blades. The towers are steel with concrete bases, and there is no money in recovering them. Convert them into homes for birds and bats to try and undo some of the damage they’ve done..

I’d leave the marine ones in place, use the bases as reminders of folly. Hell, I’d just pull the inner workings from the things, maybe fix the arms in place, and leave them for perches. The bases could be used as markers to begin reef systems in appropriate waters, too.

… perpetuated by thousands of professional people who should know better.

Any complex field of study gets subdivided and partitioned into specialities. Sure, the overarching field is generally understood by most practitioners, but the tendency is to focus on a speciality, and to accept what other specialists in the field say about their own specialities. An orthopedic surgeon and a brain surgeon can agree in general terms about patient trauma, but they would have extreme difficulty, if they were asked to work in the other person’s field. Specialization creates silo’s, and everybody takes the nearest specialist’s view’s, as being “the truth”.

This is especially true when specialists in an area all agree on what constitutes, “best practice”, in that field. You only need a few “specialists” to agree with each other, for all other professionals, from various disciplines, to accept the “consensus view” of the specialists. The longer the “consensus view” is publicized, the more entrenched it becomes, in the wider community.

But being widely accepted does not make it true. It is just widely accepted by people who have not the time, nor the inclination, to looked under the covers. This is how “untruths” become propagated, and eventually admitted into the annals of urban myth.

Happens across all professions including farming and can get some [ young ?] upstart who stands up and says thats wrong and he doesn’t hold with the current consensus, into some deep poo.

But if the doubter is subtle enough or brash enough to take the odium coming his / her way and sticks to their guns when they know a deal about a subject the whole fixated attitude and belief often collapses as others sort of start to look a bit sheepish after a while and then someone admits that, yes, they also saw something a lot different happening compared to what the current consensus says should be happening.
And suddenly they are all talking.
And it often becomes quite interesting then when some new ideas not related closely at all to the old consensus are floated up for a round of debate.

I met with my local state parliamentary “representative” who assured me he understood all about the problems of wind and solar and as well I explained to him the fra-ud of “global warming” and yet I still see him promoting the wonders of solar power.

Pierre,
From the far left coast of North America, you Sir, appear to have been a source of enlightenment and a force for sanity.
Congratulations.
Dry Side John (dry side of the Cascades of Washington State)

In the late 80′s, I lived in Munich for 3 years. Before that, I had visited Bavaria a great many times – as well as some other parts of Germany.

I knew a Norwegian girl who was a student at Augsburg – 50 km from Munich – and she was dating a German Green politician. I got to meet this guy a few times and she told me a lot more about him. This guy was so obsessed with getting political power through plugging his “Green” agenda that I found him quite scary.

Ever since then, I have been very sceptical as to the true agendas of these “Green” politicians.

They are called “Change Agents” – Communism grows through brainwashing people and the main proponents are “Change Agents” or “Community Organizers” a.k.a. left wing rabble rousers and red flaggers.

Communism itself collapses under the weight of its own ineptness evetually, but it does a lot of damage in terms of human and financial cost in the process. Communism cant work – its actually an anti-human ideology.

I noticed “International Socialist” posters going up around our local ( high school ) college, which is bad news….university, its tolerated, college I think is not a good idea…..

4 Oct: CNS News: Lauretta Brown: Pew: Most Americans Don’t Believe in ‘Scientific Consensus’ on Climate Change
Nearly three-quarters of Americans don’t trust that there is a large “scientific consensus” amongst climate scientists on human behavior being the cause of climate change, according to an in-depth survey on “the politics of climate” released Tuesday by Pew Research Center.
According to the survey, only 27 percent of Americans agree that “almost all” climate scientists say that human behavior is mostly responsible for climate change, while 35 percent say that “more than half” of climate scientists agree on this. An additional 35 percent of those surveyed say that fewer than half (20%) or almost no (15%) climate scientists believe that human behavior is the main contributing factor in climate change…
Additionally, Americans were skeptical about the expertise of climate scientists…
Americans also don’t trust the news media’s coverage of climate change…http://www.cnsnews.com/news/article/lauretta-brown/pew-most-americans-dont-believe-scientific-consensus-climate-change

I read the article – he seems like a sop for the globalists, par excellence like the UKs Cameron. anyone who rabbits on about things to be done “for the children” then declares they are going to hold thier citizenry down and force things upon them, is a clear and present danger to democracy, IMHO….

It seems he has been told he has to do x,y & z by his globalist bully-boy pay masters, and probably with sufficient “incentive” to keep his ( political ) head intact….

Vote him out as soon as you can. He will sink canada. Socialists love wrecking things…

Here is another disaster in the making in regard to NBN (National Broadband Network) satellites. As per usual practice there were meant to be two, one in use (Sky Muster) and a backup (Sky Muster II). Now it has been decided that both satellites will work together so there will be no spare.

How are people able to make decisions like this? Is engineering taught differently these days?

My brother in law has a haouse in shepparton , country victoria. He was told when he wanted a new phoneline that it had to be NBN ( NBN = “No Body Notified us” ) or nothing.

What to do. Go mobile 100%? Anyway, he got fibre to the house, whch wa shis only choice. The network sped he is getting for his ADSL is bad too, which is odd considering its optic fibre to the house.

As I’ve said a few times on this board, the NBN thing is purely about forcing all traffic down a single choke point that can be monitored easily and cut off as required if you are naughty….very Chinese like really….but we arent suprised.

Renewable energy perhaps but windtowers have a lifespan of only 20 years. By the time the SA government finished building windfarms, they will be tearing the first ones down. They are not serviceable but disposable.

The 520MW Northern Station in Port Augusta was only closed in May 2016 but was commissioned in 1985, so it was relatively new at 31 years. Why was it closed?
Why not turn it on again, or did they blow that one up too, to prevent it being used?

Then as power generation was sold off by the states for billions, the states decided to use the money to compete by funding and subsidizing the operation of windmills, destroying the value of what they sold. This is a total misuse of public money. Our taxes used to subsidize inefficient, short term, unsustainable power stations and forcing reliable cheap energy stations to close while State governments stayed in the energy game as competitors?

Why is South Australia better off for the closure of the Port Augusta Station and massive National taxpayer subsidies for unreliable wind power? How has anyone benefited except the windmill vendors, mostly overseas?

Our taxes should not be used to push the environmental fantasies of a few people at enormous cost to everyone. It has defeated the whole purpose of privatization of power, to get state governments out of the power generation business

Renewable is a lie. It does not mean eternal and free. Quite the opposite. By the time the windtowers are in place, they will have to come down. That is not sustainable without endless billions in taxes for nothing.

There is no point Weatherill complaining about the failure of the energy amrket. If there is a failure of the free market to deliver cheap and reliable power, it is because his government cannot let go of control of the energy market and then complain when their ideas are demonstrably wrong. The energy market is fake and real players like the owners of Hazelwood in Victoria are being forced to consider closure. Who wins then? Not South Australians.

Naw, they are true renewables – just like tax assessments and levies. Up in X years, and renewed at the deadline even after promising the levies and taxes are just to get by the crunch. Renew and renew again, at huge costs covered by the taxes and levies.

The industrialisation of landscapes became obvious when I visited Germany in 2007 having previously visited in 1999. German environmentalists are worse than the boiling frog; not just lacking but also rejecting perspectives of what their pot was like less than 8 years ago. The dedication to their delusion was so intoxicating.

P.S.: A major supplier of energy and wind power operator in Germany, E.On; reported in 2005 that wind power required not only around 100% conventional shadow capacity (spinning reserve) but also its own high-voltage grid to preserve grid stability with a high penetration of fluctuating renewables.

Protests are now mounting against those “necessary” high-voltage power transmission lines; as well as the landscape- and sleep-disrupting wind turbines. Germany’s bird protection lobby seems to have been silenced — the Red Kite is close to extinct — so when the turbines stop, the rodents return without the threat of that raptor.

The published advice of real experts in energy; those running the system; was dismissed in a Merkelian Wir schaffen das! (We can do it). Details and dreamers are opposites.

What we see are not unintended consequences; they are the predicted outcomes of which many warned.

I wonder how Alfred Toepfer would have view this. He was after all the father of the German green revolution.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Alfred Toepfer (1894-1993) was an extremely successful German tycoon, an avid environmentalist, and a key influential supporter for the development of the European Union.
Toepfer made his fortune in agri-business during the fateful years of the Weimar Republic (1919-1933). During the 1930s, Toepfer was also very loyal to the nasty installed militaristic regime, even though he was never a full card-carrying member. Toepfer was particularly loyal to Heinrich Himmler and his ‘blood and soil’ SS, the greenest faction of the dominant political party of the day…

Interesting how people care so much about birds killed by wind turbines and want them banned…….and dont give a crap about all the birds killed by trucks and cars and dont want them banned?? Be interesting to know the relative numbers??

I have been driving a vehicle for 37 years and have yet to strike a bird. In all my days of driving, I have seen possibly a dozen birds that were killed by cars – provably so. 13,505 days and 12 or so birds.

I understand that each windmill has a kill total of about that per day during migration – maybe half in non-migratory seasons. Let’s be nice and go with 4 per windmill per day.

That’s 54,020 birds I’d expect to see killed by one windmill compared to the 12 I have seen since I began driving. Even at ONE bird per day average, that’d still be 13,505 to 12.

Even at 1/4 bird average per day (1 in four days) that’s a big number – 33,751. And a wing. Compared to 12.

Hi Jo, I just popped some chocs in the Tip Jar, but Pay Pal has changed its format and I couldn’t say thanks for your continuing hard work. This item is a winner, good research and maybe, just maybe, the start of something new. Add to this the SA debacle and even the disinterested may start taking notice. Thanks again.

I have had some time off and now have a very nasty coughing lurgi doing the rounds here so my pet palsied red thumbed Lurch needs a bit of practice with his red thumb.
You just happened to get in the way of his shaking palsied red thumb. I see he brought his sidekick Lurchalotta along as well as a couple of other of Lurch’s rellies to get instruction on how to hold their red thumbs when hitting that little red box

5 Oct: ABC: South Australian blackout: Malcolm Turnbull politicking at time of emergency, Jay Weatherill says
By Malcolm Sutton and staff
The Prime Minister was “politicking” at a time of emergency by blaming renewable energy for last week’s statewide power outage, South Australian Premier Jay Weatherill says.
Mr Weatherill accused Malcolm Turnbull of using the emergency to “lecture South Australians about the dangers of renewable energy”.
“We also saw [SA Opposition Leader] Steven Marshall suggest that renewable energy was at the heart of the system,” he said.
“The remarks were also made at a time when government officials, emergency services workers, support agencies were working to help people protect life and limb and property, and to support people that had suffered.”
Mr Weatherill also took aim at Independent Senator Nick Xenophon for drumming up fear about hospital services by suggesting people would not be able to get their oxygen during the black-out.
“I believe that three leaders failed that test.
“What they [the SA people] saw was politicking.”…

The comments came on the same day a preliminary report was released by the Australian Energy Market Operator (AEMO), outlining that it remained unknown what role wind power played in the statewide power outage that lasted up to three days…
It said generation initially flowed through the damaged systems but “following an extensive number of faults in a short period [seconds], 315 MW of wind generation disconnected”.
“The uncontrolled reduction in generation resulted in increased flow on the main Victorian interconnector to make up the deficit,” AEMO said.
This resulted in the interconnector overloading and an automatic-protection mechanism tripping the interconnector to protect it from damage, causing the rest of SA black-out…
The report said there was a reduction in wind farm generation at connection points leading up to the outage, but more analysis was required to discern what that cause was…

Thanks Pat,
While I didn’t like premier Weatherill’s response, as being rather hypocritical, I did like this section:
“…said generation initially flowed through the damaged systems but “following an extensive number of faults in a short period [seconds], 315 MW of wind generation disconnected”.
“The uncontrolled reduction in generation resulted in increased flow on the main Victorian interconnector to make up the deficit,” AEMO said.
This resulted in the interconnector overloading and an automatic-protection mechanism tripping the interconnector to protect it from damage, causing the rest of SA black-out…
The report said there was a reduction in wind farm generation at connection points leading up to the outage, but more analysis was required to discern what that cause was…”

This provides the sequence of events immediately before the total blackout, and for me most interesting was the loss of windpower before the shut down of the connector. It will be interesting to see the final report.
Cheers,
Dave B

It has a couple of very detailed, even if preliminary, timelines. Looks to me like a very good job done in quite a short time. Worthy of considered evaluation, rather than quick damnation. (But still no mention of wind speeds causing cut out of turbines.)

Seems from that report you linked that there were transmission line failures, then a loss of a lot of wind power, then then more line failures and then loss of the interconnector. Started with lines going down as far as i can tell. So, was it network faults that shoved the wind power offline, or something else?

“Science is legitimizing a rampage against nature.” Not really. “The” science is a story told by a few people, most not scientists
and against the views of a large proportion of scientists.

James Hansen for example does not speak for all of NASA and many staff wrote a protest letter to say so. The same for the American Physicists association, hijacked by a few. Many real scientists think this is all fantasy and what would a geneticist like Sir Paul Nurse know about the subject as head of the Royal Society. He speaks for himself.

The heads of many organizations are political and do not represent the views of their members but of one or two people who have seized power
at the committee level. Nor in fact does Malcolm Turnbull speak on behalf of the Liberal party, just his faction in the NSW Liberal Party, Malcolm’s Green Liberals who are against most traditional Liberal views.

So to blame science is wrong or even scientists for this assault on nature. No, man made Global warming is not science or even its third cousin.

People are clearing the forests so they can make billions erecting useless windmills supported by Greens who get political power from having absurd environmental causes in rich countries. Building windmills in Germany is so much more rewarding in every way than building them where they are actually needed. It’s all about the money and the power. The Green they want is the colour of money.

4 Oct: Guardian: Adam Vaughan: Solar outstrips coal in past six months of UK electricity generation
More power came from solar panels than from Britain’s ageing coal stations from April to September this year, report shows
Solar had already eclipsed coal for a day in April and then for the whole month of May, with coal providing zero power for the first time in more than 100 years for several days in May…

***The trend will not continue into winter because of solar’s seasonal nature, but the ***symbolic records reveal the dramatic impacts solar subsidies and environmental penalties for coal have wrought…

3 Oct: Reuters: Alister Doyle: Paris climate accord to go into force: but faces test of enforcement
A global agreement on climate change is set to win enough ratifications by signatory nations this week to go into force in November, heralding a harder phase of turning promises into cuts in greenhouse gas emissions.
The 2015 Paris Agreement, outlining a shift from fossil fuels this century, says efforts to oversee compliance will be “non-adversarial and non-punitive”, raising questions about how to ensure governments pull their weight…
“The key question will be implementing the agreement. There’s no legal enforcement of pledges,” said Robert Watson, a British-American scientist and former head of the U.N.’s panel of climate experts.
The hope is governments will feel a “moral obligation” and “peer pressure” to act, he told Reuters…http://www.reuters.com/article/us-climatechange-paris-idUSKCN1231ON

We have Germany with its renewables and now being highlighted is just how useless they really are at delivering power.

We have South Australia, also with a high impact of renewables, and now being highlighted is the fragility of that.

We have Queensland, now being touted as The Solar State.

So let me show you all, (again) how wonderful this solar plan really is.

There are plans for 6 new (as they refer to them) large scale solar plants with a total Nameplate of 300MW.

Not 20Km from where I am sitting now is the Stanwell (coal fired) power plant with a Nameplate of 1460MW. It has four units, and it delivers around 10,500GWH of power each year to Queenslanders, so (somewhat simplistically) dividing that by four (the number of units) that gives us around 2600GWH of power a year from just the one unit.

The total amount of power delivered from these 6 new solar plants is being delivered by this one unit at Stanwell in, umm, ….. 65 days.

The Stanwell unit delivers its power 24/7/365. The Solar Plants for (a year round average of) 4 hours a day. (perhaps 6 hours in Summer)

So, here we have 6 new solar plants, and not enough power to close ONE UNIT at ONE POWER PLANT, Stanwell for 65 DAYS.

One unit at Stanwell (Unit Number Four) holds a World record for the longest run time at full power delivery for a coal fired unit on Planet Earth, when, after a scheduled Maintenance period, they ran it up to speed, synchronised it, switched it onto the grid, and it ran at full speed, 3000RPM for 1,073 days continuously.

That one unit delivered more power in those 1073 days that all of these solar plants will deliver in their full 20 year lifespan, if those solar plants perform at their optimum for that full 20 years.

David,
Tony only referred to the power side of the argument. That side of the argument is small-fry compared with the cost side of the argument.
But the inner city Greens love to ignore rational arguments.

Just what I need, Tony, for a little chat I am about to have with my Green/Labor son-n-law. He refuses to discus science, but I am sure I can get him going on this one. Thanks again for your insight and understanding on the facts.

Peter: I have yet to meet a ‘warmist’ who refers to figures and real-world data in an argument.
It’s an interesting phenomenon. I think that the propaganda has been so effective that people just will not accept an alternative view. Any discussion isn’t possible – it all ends in animosity and heated (no pun intended) argument.

4 Oct: Reuters: Physical coal prices surge to highest since start of 2014
By Henning Gloystein and Nina Chestney
The biggest impact has been on Australian coal, the main price benchmark for the Asia/Pacific region, and a core supplier to China.
Australian prompt Newcastle cargo prices have shot up 12.8 percent since the end of September to $82 per tonne, their highest since January 2014. Newcastle cargo prices are up 68.4 percent from multi-year lows touched in January.
One trader said coal prices would keep rising until the situation in the Asia/Pacific region changes, which might not be until the end of the first quarter next year…
Another trader said China’s new policies had left the world’s biggest coal consumer “desperately short” of supplies at a time when demand seasonally strengthens ahead of winter.
Thermal coal imports surged in August, rising 20 percent month-on-month to 20 million tonnes…
In a move to boost local supplies, China last week ordered major mines to raise thermal coal output by another 500,000 tonnes per day…
NOT JUST CHINA
Despite the near-term downside risk to prices, there are other supportive factors, including firm demand from developed markets such as South Korea, and across most emerging markets…
“An added bullish factor is by way of increased coal usage from the European power sector as a result of all the nuclear reactors out of action,” said Wayne Bryan, analyst at consultancy Alfa Energy…
French utility EDF said last week it would carry out tests on some nuclear reactors during the winter months, triggering fears about the French system’s ability to meet peak demand if temperatures fall below normal…http://www.reuters.com/article/us-coal-markets-idUSKCN1240C9

4 Oct: Washington Examiner: John Siciliano: Former NASA climate chief says fossil industry must pay trillions
A former NASA climate scientist is urging a full-court press against the fossil fuel industry to get the hundreds of trillions of dollars necessary for the next generation to combat global warming.
James Hansen is releasing a study Tuesday that looks at global temperature rise over the next few decades and what it will cost the younger generation to pay to reduce the warming trend that many scientists say is caused by fossil fuel use.
“Despite widespread recognition of the risks posed by climate change, global fossil fuel emissions continue at a high rate that tends to make these [emission reduction] targets increasingly improbable,” the study said…
***Hansen concludes from the findings that the younger generation, which will not have sufficient revenue to combat that kind of rapid warming, must turn to the courts to sue for the trillions of dollars that will be required to tackle it effectively and quickly…
“Even optimistic assumptions” show the cost will be in the “100s of trillions of dollars,” he told reporters…
He also said that the Paris climate change deal and President Obama’s climate agenda are virtually toothless…http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/former-nasa-climate-chief-says-fossil-industry-must-pay-trillions/article/2603511

thought “100s of trillions of dollars” might be an exaggeration of what Hansen said, but apparently not. $570 trillion is the new CAGW high:

Planet at its hottest in 115000 years thanks to climate change, experts say
The Guardian – ‎22 hours ago‎
In order to meet targets set at last year’s Paris climate accord to avoid runaway climate change, “massive CO2 extraction” costing an eye-watering $104tn to $570tn will be required over the coming century with “large risks and uncertain feasibility” as to its success, the paper states…
Hansen: “Even with optimistic assumptions (future emissions reduction) will cost hundreds of trillions of dollars”…

4 Oct: Daily Caller: Michael Bastasch: The ‘Godfather’ Of Global Warming Puts Out New Study — To Help His Legal Battle Against The Feds
But Hansen’s new study is less about science and more about bolstering a legal case his environmental group has brought against the federal government over global warming. The case is now under review by a federal judge and a decision should be forthcoming.
Hansen is listed as a plaintiff in a suit brought by the group Our Children’s Trust (OCT) against the Obama administration to compel the government to cut greenhouse gas emissions 6 percent a year — which would be a legal endorsement of the cuts Hansen called for in a 2013 study…
Hansen’s study mentions OCT’s lawsuit against the Obama administration, but neglects to disclose he is listed as a plaintiff in the suit…

“Their findings revealed that the global methane concentration in the atmosphere have doubled since the 18th century and have mysteriously peaked in 1999. The concentration of methane remained constant until 2007 but started to increase once again. Scientists are not really sure what caused the sudden rise of methane concentration in the atmosphere, but they noted that oil and gas industry is not to blame.”

So an increase since the 1700s, then a pause of about 8 years, then another increase. And they don’t know -why- other than oil and gas isn’t at fault.

… when they all start to realize that living ones life 100% reactively – with not a proactive bone in ones body – just defeats their own cause once everyone else (including themselves) realizes that such vision-less crusades are completely futile … and dangerous.

Also, how many of the Greens who are vociferous ‘anti-capitalists’ are developing buyers remorse now that they are starting to realize that the managers of the 20 Trillion+ Carbon Market (a ‘free capital market’), will be managed by Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, HSBC, et al? I can’t imagine how these ‘anti-capitalist’ creatures don’t feel REALLY, really stupid right about now.

Perhaps it requires the ability to feel shame for urinating on the ashes of the civilization their ancestors built which provided the high human-development-index they enjoy, or at least the ability to feel shame for something other than merely hurting the feelings of minority groups?

But, this kind of buyer’s remorse, if it catches on in Oz, can only mean one thing for the peoples of Victoria and South Australia; wind power will need to be added to the list of banned energy sources to be phased out or capped for no future development or renewal:- BANNED: Brown Coal- BANNED: Black Coal- BANNED: Fracked Gas- BANNED: Conventional Gas- BANNED: Nuclear- BANNED: Wind Power
… so, Solar in the desert MUST be the answer to every ‘green’ ‘problem’, as long as the sun is shining … but as we all know, the sun is always shining for people who believe in green unicorns (‘green jobs’), and at the end of every virtuous rainbow a pot of virtue gold (the ‘green economy’, an oxymoron when ‘green’ now means stupid) … until the never ending blackout begins, reality kicks in, and it’s every man for himself!

While we’re off topic here, I remember watching the (adapted) version of that novel on ABCTV, done as a 6 part series. It was just so funny, the only thing I have ever liked David Suchet (Blott) playing.

It had the catchiest theme, (short video at this link) and Blott himself would do that theme with his own voice, sounding like brass instruments.

A year later, in 1987, I was at RAAF Wagga as a Tech Trades Instructor, and we went to the Grad Parade for the current graduating crop of Trade Apprentices. They got the RAAF Central Band up from Laverton to play for the drill elements of the parade and the march past. A March past takes time, so there were a number of marching tunes, as well as during the drill section of the Parade. One was the expected RAF March Past theme, and I knew they would play an old standard, John Phillip Sousa’s Liberty Bell, (theme from Monty Python) but part way through they started to play this song. I knew it was familiar, but couldn’t quite place it, until it hit me. I got some filthy looks from surrounding crowd (parents of apprentices) when I started to chuckle after recognising the tune.

Amazing things, Military Bands, and RAAF Central is one of the best. They also provided the dance music for the Grad Ball that night, as each band member must by totally proficient on three instruments before even being accepted into the Band as a trainee, so they make an excellent dance band for occasions like this.

The energy company Red Energy in VIC says it supplies customers with only renewable sourced energy.

Don’t you think, then that there must be a market opportunity for a company that sells only fossil fuel or hydro sourced energy? (I regard hydro as a legitimate form of energy even though it might be “renewable”.) Sadly of course, no nuclear in Australia.

Yeah, i read that, then i had a look at the actual report. conclusion? Lloyd may have poor comprehension skills. But he is a journo after all.[Editorial discretion applied - please avoid potentially libelous statements] Fly

No, that is not what the report says or even suggests. From the times in the report, Transmission “faults” followed by windfarms offline, followed by more transmission faults, and the interconnector going down. Assertions so far that wind farm generation dropping out was the cause of the failure are unsupported by any actual evidence. Its possible that the level of wind input into the system exacerbated the situation?? But that is speculation unsupported by evidence at this point.

5 Oct: AFR: Mark Ludlow: Series of faults plunged SA into darkness, says AEMO report.
As state and federal energy ministers prepare for Friday’s urgent Council of Australian Energy Council meeting to deal with the fall-out from the SA power crisis, the preliminary AEMO report will raise further questions about the state being too dependant on renewable energy like wind and solar.
Storm the ‘fundamental cause’…

Mr Weatherill said the report showed the cause of the blackout was the storm, not the mix of power supply in the state.
“It is a storm event, not a mix event,” he said.
“The fundamental root cause is the storm,” he said.
But he did concede that wind farms were a part of the overall system which had failed.
“The wind farms were part of the picture,” Mr Weatherill said.
“There were wind farms that were unable to operate because they were above a break in the system”.

But Australian Energy Council Chief Executive Matthew Warren said the report raised a number of operational issues that required more detailed analysis, particularly given the high levels of intermittent generation now operating in South Australia.
“The preliminary report by AEMO suggests we need to think differently about how we run a decarbonising electricity system, reflecting the significant differences between using conventional thermal generation compared to a mix with higher levels of intermittent renewables,” Mr Warren said…READ ONhttp://www.afr.com/news/politics/series-of-faults-plunged-sa-into-darkness-says-aemo-report-20161004-grv0vy

5 Oct: BusinessGreen: Jocelyn Timperley: Report: Cost of expanded winter capacity auction could triple
Green Alliance warns cost of upcoming capacity market auction could soar as government focuses on expanding combined cycle gas turbine power plants rather than boosting flexibility…
The winter capacity market is designed to guarantee winter power supply and avoid the lights going out, and this year the government is expanding the size of the auction…
However, Green Alliance will today publish a new analysis warning the expansion of the capacity market and the fact all winning bids in the auction are upgraded to the same clearing price despite the level of their original bid, means this year’s auction could cost ***£2.6bn, up from just £800,000 in 2015′s auction – an additional cost burden which will be passed onto energy consumers…
In its new report, Green Alliance argues the government needs to reform how it organises its capacity market, particularly in light of the UK’s increased reliance on more intermittent renewable energy sources…
The Department for Business, Energy, and Industrial Strategy was considering a response at the time of going to press.http://www.businessgreen.com/bg/news/2472991/report-cost-of-expanded-winter-capacity-auction-could-triple

ABC total spin, with Weatherill politicking specifically for the program, it would seem, while Turnbull is heard shouting his “rule one – keep the lights on” spiel, presumably somewhere in SA early Wed morning – probably before the release of the preliminary report:

5 Oct: ABC The World Today: Australian Energy Market Operator preliminary report finds severe weather caused SA blackout
In South Australia, a preliminary report into last week’s state-wide electricity blackout has confirmed that severe weather was the cause.
The South Australian Premier has taken the opportunity to hit back at the Prime Minister’s intervention over the crisis, accusing Malcolm Turnbull of using the disaster to play politics.
Featured:
Jay Weatherill, South Australian Premier
Malcolm Turnbull, Prime Ministerhttp://www.abc.net.au/worldtoday/content/2016/s4548135.htm

SBS headline 3 hours ago was:

Blackout not from renewables: SA Premier
SBS-3 hours ago

but now changed to the following when u click on the link…tho there’s still plenty of Weatherill politicking included:

5 Oct: SBS: AAP: Renewables rush part of blackout: SA Libs
South Australia’s Liberals say there is “no doubt” the Labor state government’s rush towards intermittent renewable energy contributed to SA’s blackout.
…Opposition energy spokesman Dan van Holst Pellekaan said there was “no doubt” the state government’s rush towards intermittent renewable energy played some role in the mess.
He is calling for an independent inquiry into the incident, separate to the AEMO.
“The problem is not renewable energy, it’s intermittent energy. Until we can store renewable energy, it is intermittent, and we all know that intermittent energy is unreliable energy,” he told reporters.
“For us to have 41 per cent of our state exposed to intermittent energy at the moment is completely unacceptable.
“It’s state government policy that has got us into this situation and that’s why we need an independent inquiry to look at it.”
Earlier on Wednesday, Mr Turnbull said Mr Weatherill had a case to answer to “keep the lights on” in his state…http://www.sbs.com.au/news/article/2016/10/05/renewables-rush-part-blackout-sa-libs

pat:
since the combined knowledge of electricity generation of Weatherill and Turnbull could be written on the back of a postage stamp with a broad texta-pen, I can’t see it adding anything to the debate. The only good could be that if Turnbull gets shirty with Sir Jay Quixote then he may not be that generous with federal funds towards fixing the mess in SA.

Desperate Dopey Despot Dan here in Victoria who if there was a chook raffle in a pub, would sell the pub without the owner’s consent and give the proceeds and the chook to his Union mates.
&Here’s Hoping, Hydro Hodgman running out of hydro water, Tasmania
&Palace-chick Pallaszczuk, chief Banshee of Queensland’s SE corner who doesn’t know or want to know that what happens in Brisbane doesn’t extend or apply to Cape York and Burketown or anywhere much elsewhere in Queensland.

And now

Whirling Dervish Windmill Weatherill in SA who whirling furiously on the media spot blames towers falling down for no power whereas the towers falling down were a secondary result from the advancing storm front as it swept across SA after his favorite grandiosely hyped “no carbon” equally fast whirling wind turbines cut themselves off to save themselves from destruction as the frontal system arrived, overloaded the Victorian links, blew the connectors out and cascaded the whole damn thing for a thousand kilometres north to SA’s most lucrative economic industries and shut them and most other SA industries down for who knows how long.
But then what would Whirling Dervish Windmill Weatherill know about storm fronts and etc? He’s only a politician !

No ratings allowed above as we would all vote for our own premiers as the winner of being the best political SNAFU artists of implacable policy FU’s emanating from an utterly mindless adherence to what is currently deemed political correct by the inner city elite.

:….towers falling down were a secondary result from the advancing storm front as it swept across SA ………..wind turbines cut themselves off to save themselves from destruction as the frontal system arrived, overloaded the Victorian links, blew the connectors out and cascaded the whole damn thing

Has the exact time of the towers falling down been clearly established? Does anyone have a reference for this? Also what area was isolated due to the towers falling? Most MSM reports point to the fallen towers as the primary cause of the blackout.

Also, given that the high winds were predicted and knowing that wind turbines cut off suddenly , it would have been prudent to spin up more generators at Torrens and elswhere prior to the front coming through. What was the reason for not bringing more reserve on line?

Keep in mind here that above a certain wind speed, every wind tower has its blades feathered and then locked shut so they cannot rotate.

If the wind got up suddenly as it did, then the wind plants shut off automatically.

Just before the blackout, all of South Australia’s wind plants were supplying just on 1000MW of Nameplate, and the other 900MW of total demand were made up from the Heywood Interconnector, and Torrens B I think.

As soon as all those wind plants stopped, led by the Snowtown plant, then that’s 1000MW needed. The Interconnector is supplying at Maximum, so to protect it, it was shut down, again, automatically, leaving just Torrens B to supply, now also tapped out, so it drops off line too, hence, no power.

I want to see a dedicated time line of failure. Did the towers come down first, or did the wind turn off first.

Hi Tony,
Appendix A of the report contains a schematic of the SA 275kV grid.

If you step through the individual link failures you can map out the broken sections. Near as I can tell, only Brinkworth was isolated. All of the generators, wind, fossil and interconnect, were grid connected at the time of failure.

I would also guess (for that is all I’ve got) that trying to arrange any form of ‘graded protection’ throughout the grid is made so much more difficult to arrange with ‘renewables’ on grid.
I can not see how it could not be done without a lot of communication between devices on line continuously. However the problem would sill be that the protective devices are only reacting to events that have already happened (reactions to history).

Looking at the time line on the AEMO site, it would seem that the demand on the Vic interconnector rose rapidly as the wind farms shut down and, seconds later, the interconnector tripped and shut itself off. It would seem that this happened before the pylons went down, as by that time there was nothing coming out of Vic. It all happened at about 18 minutes past 4, EST, plus a few seconds.

From the actual report and the times quoted in it, it looks like some towers went down between 16:17:33 and 16:18:15.8 There were dropouts from wind generators between 16:18:09 and 16:18:15.2. then the inter connector goes down at 16:18:15.8.

So there were lines come down BEFORE the wind gen went out and lines come down after wind gen went out. All seesm to hve started with lines coming down and some kind of cascade of events after that.

Given that some lines went down first it is not clear that wind turbines are entirely to blame for the problem. Some of us have been too quick to blame renewables and it is still not clear (to me at least) if the wind turbines shut down because of high winds of as a result of the pylons falling over.

Had there been more spinning reserve at Torrens, for example, it may have been possible to keep much of the grid functioning. Why didn’t they put more gas generation on standby, given the forecast winds? Whenever wind turbine generation is at such a high level it can drop to zero very suddenly.

The wind farm’s turbines automatically start turning when wind speed is greater than 15 km/hr.
The turbines reach maximum power at wind speeds of 54 km/hr and automatically shut down in very high winds greater than 72 km/hr.
The turbines are also protected by a lightning protection system.

—————-

In recording the wind speeds it should be recognised that at the height of the turbine nacelles, the wind velocities could be up to a couple of tens of of kilometres more that at the standard ten metre height of the BOM’s aneometers.
Particularly if the terrain that the wind flows over upwind of the turbines is at all rolling or hilly for up to ten or more kilometres upwind.

I have soared and maintained height for a half an hour or more in weak very low level wave at 1,500 feet in a glider in winds coming off the Grampian Mountains some 30 kilometres upwind of the Horsham airfield on a number of occasions over the last fifty years of my recently ceased flying.

So winds at turbine nacelle height can often do all sorts of quite weird things when affected by upwind terrain.
Which is another reason you see very large variations in the both farm and individual generating capacity, the critical to generating efficiencies “Capacity Factor” of wind turbines.
In Germany the “Capacity Factor” is now down to an extraordinarily low 18% of the always quoted name plate total generating capacity of all of Germany’s land based turbines.

The Danish wind farm Horns Rev 2, the world’s largest in 2009,[4] comprises 91 Siemens SWT-2.3-93 wind turbines each of 2.3 MW, with a nominal total capacity of 209 MW.

In 2012, the wind farm generated 956 GW·h of electricity.[5] The capacity factor for this wind farm was 52.1%.

Onshore wind farms can reach capacity factors of over 60%, for example the 44 MW Eolo plant in Nicaragua had a net generation of 232.132 MWh in 2015, equivalent to a capacity factor of 60.2%.

Which is still a lot less less than two thirds of the maker’s plate claim of total generating capacity for those turbines.
And thats with the highest wind turbine Capacity Factor in the world

With turbines and efficiencies it is location, location, location.

There are algorithms around that show that as the number of turbines installed increase, the combined Capacity Factor of all the turbines just keeps right on going down as per Germany.

And I strongly suspect that it is the speed of access to the OPM, “Other Peoples Money” that drives most wind turbine investment locations, rarely the gain in overall total efficiencies by a wiser choosing of a better location .

Then just before the gearboxes and bearings begin to fail regularly from about eight to ten years on, you sell the whole shebang as a going concern making lots of money to some wood duck superannuation fund and then promptly leave town.
——————-
Sept 28th wind speeds and times observations from a couple of the BOM’s SA automatic stations near major SA wind farms .
.
Looking at the list of wind farms on page 8 of the Preliminary AEMO Report which were operating when SA went Black at 16.18 CST on Sept 28, it appears that a number of farms on the Eyre and Yorke Peninsula had already shut down due to the wind speeds of the BOM’s aenometers at Pt Lincoln registering WNW 96 kph velocities at 23.26 CST sometime after SA went black which indicates the winds speeds coming out of the Bight had been climbing through the day.

In fact 107 kph was recorded at Pt Lincoln @ 02.18 CST on the 29th.
———-
The Mt Millar Farm at Cleve on the upper Eyre Peninsula was still on line and dropped out when the Black hit at 16.18 CST.

The Snow Town observations right near the heaviest concentration of SA wind farms has the winds at 9 am as North 13 kph

At the 3 pm observations NNE @ 28 kph so climbing fast.

And at 15.28 NW @ 104 kph.

——————-
Perhaps some of the newer turbines are rated at higher wind speeds up to the 80 plus KPH before closing down and braking but it seems that the whole wind turbine system was being pushed right to its limits in an endeavor to make as much money as possible.
And the fact that the link was providing so much power from Vic [ Vic link 613 MW. Wind 883 MW & 330 MW from thermal ? ] ] whilst some of the western wind farms were already shut down should have been a darn good warning that things were going to get messy very shortly.

Ceduna observationsfrom over 500 kms to the west the near top of the Bight in fact showed 89 kph @ 15.04 CST over an hour before the Black so the data was there for a progressive shut down of the wind turbine system and a firing up of at least four of the eight of the Torrens gas powered generators which could churn out 1280 MW of power when in operation before the mothballing of four generators due to not being able to compete against the heavily subsidised SA wind and solar. .

SA’s power requirements per AEMO on the evening of the Sept 28 at the time of the black was 1860 MWs.
Between four of those Torrens generators and the Vic link, SA would still have had enough power just maybe, except where the lines were down or at fault.
When you take the wind out of the SA system there is NO spare capacity it appears anywhere in the SA system either in the Vic link and in Torrens with its four mothballed steam turbines out of eight and other small generators such as the 80 MW Penola generators to run all of SA.

Weatherill in his arrogant and hubris laden green stupidity and intellectual vacuousness, and thats about all it can be described as, has really taken SA right to the outer edge of the basic power supply that is the fundamental basis for the continued existence of any advanced civilised society today.

So with deep regret unless and until major changes are made and fast it might well be “Vale South Australia”!

Yes I find the words that trip moderation to be arbitrator at best. I’ve still work out what causes a ‘moderation’ event, I believe the dictionary of bad words must be on ‘auto update’ and reacts to what ever the politically correct consensus mentality of the day believes that minute.

Except that there is no agreement.
Congress didn’t pass anything because Congress was never presented with anything.
Now, if they’d accepted that the hand shake of Barry Obama, as sincere as I expect it was, isn’t worth the paper it’s written on, they’d be closer to the mark.
So, no it wasn’t even a . .

Another OT subject but just noticed that BOM have changed the flood peak levels for north east Victoria , the new peaks are lower than the old ones .
Whenever Bom changes stuff like this it’s usually to fit the CAGW meme .

Located on Fifteen Mile Creek approx 30 km south of Wangaratta. Note: Minor and Moderate ood levels for the Fifteen Mile Creek at Greta South were recently changed by the Bureau of Meteorolgy.
8.54 m 7.00 m
6.08 m
6.00 m
5.96 m 5.73 m 5.00 m
4.20 m
3.20 m
1993 ood level. 53 homes ooded along One Mile Creek.
Above- oor ooding begins in the lower houses along One Mile Creek near Rowan Street.
September 2010 ood level.
2.80 m
MAJOR FLOOD LEVEL
At Major Flood Level,roads and land along One Mile and Three Mile Creeks are likely to start ooding. Extensive ooding of farmland north and south of the freeway between the One Mile and Fifteen Mile Creeks near Greta Road.
December 2010 ood level.
1974 ood level.
Flooding begins along One Mile Creek near Cribbes Road and impacts the most ood prone properties in Graham Avenue.
MODERATE FLOOD LEVEL (previously 5.00 m)
Around the Three Mile Creek, the South Wangaratta Industrial area e.g. Tone Road GoTAFE paddocks, CFA and SES Training Grounds and low-lying farms near freeway ood. Around the One Mile Creek Rattray Avenue footbridge closed and low-level ooding likely along roads and land in other areas including Swan and Bronmar Streets.
MINOR FLOOD LEVEL (previously 3.20 m)

Doesn’t seem to copy very well but the minor and moderate levels of the 15 mile creek have been homogenised lower .

The ABC headline: “South Australian blackout: Unclear whether wind power played a role in the outage, report says”
From the ABC reporter’s article: “It said there was a reduction in wind farm generation at connection points leading up to the outage”
Actual quote from the report: “In the events leading up to SA region Black System, generation reduction occurred at six wind farms. There was no reduction in thermal generation.”
The Appendix A shows that the disconnects in Davenport-Belalie and Davenport-MtLock lines still left an operable route from the windfarms to Adelaide via Robertstown and Para.

So the line breaks are not sufficient to explain why the generation at the windfarms stopped. At best the wind farms electronics may have sensed the line breaks downstream and dealt with it incorrectly by dropping out unnecessarily. At worst, they may have auto-tethered due to high wind and the close proximity to the line break might be random co-incidence. Bearing in mind the complexities of putting variable sources into a static grid with dozens of resonances, variable sources in a grid that has just changed its capacitance due to a line break is surely bordering on uncontrollable.

Either way, the ALPBC is lying again about wind farms. All other candidate causes have been eliminated.

What’s so funny about wind is that it is so easy to use past Green arguments to argue against it. Let’s pretend that the Green agenda suddenly said that wind power was bad. Here’s an example of a Green press release for advocating action against ‘Big Wind’:

“Instability of the grid in the latest blackout has been tied directly to the use of wind power. For years the political right has foisted their lie about the reliability of this technology that does nothing more than line the pockets of ‘Big Wind’ while putting regular Australians at risk. Apart from being a tremendous eyesore and altering once bucolic landscapes, ‘Big WInd’ is responsible for the deaths of millions of birds and bats annually. Studies have shown that the loss of birds and bats directly results in an increase in insect borne diseases such as zika and malaria which disproportionately affect children and the elderly. University of Adelaide studies have also linked the noise pollution generated by these unnatural monstrosities to lower test scores in children who live near wind farms. There is also a study from the University of East Anglia which suggests that the alteration of natural wind patterns from the extraction of wind energy from the atmosphere changes centuries old weather patterns and could lead to unprecedented changes in our climate. This latest blackout, one of many more to come, has shown what will be the new normal if we don’t act now.”

It’s about time the true environmentalists stood up to this approach that does more damage than it cures .
German landscape polluted by bird blenders .
Here’s a Al gore type prediction . Within five years ANY politician that promotes carbon taxes , or other subsidies to “stop the climate from changing ” will be sticking nuts on donuts .[Some editorial discretion applied] Fly